Detective Paco in "The Case of the Hot Camel" (Part II)

A couple of days later, we drove up I-95 in unexpectedly light traffic. The conversation had been pretty light, too.

“Ok, Wronwright, you haven’t said two words in the last three hours. What’s your beef?”

“Paco, you could at least have done the sporting thing and let me know before we got twenty miles out of the city that you expected me to impersonate the rear end of a camel.”

“Is that all that’s bothering you? Relax. You can be the front end if you like. Er, you haven’t been eating any more of those bean burritos, have you?”

“That’s not the point!”

“It sure is the point. It’s kind of close inside that costume.”

“No, no, no, I mean about having to be either end of a camel. It’s…it’s undignified.”

“C’mon, Wronwright! You’ll not only be helping to save the life of a camel puppy…”

“I think they’re called ‘calves’”.

“Whatever. As I was saying, you’ll be saving this creature from a fiery fate, and you’ll also be giving the Libyans one in the eye. And there’s always the most important thing of all; we’re getting paid.”

We rode along in silence for a while, when, suddenly, I heard the rattle of cellophane. “You want a bean burrito?” Wronwright asked, in a conciliatory tone, as he began munching on one.

“No, thanks”, I said, taking the precaution of rolling down the window.

* * * *

We pulled into the Stuyvesant’s driveway in the late afternoon. Their home was quite an impressive old pile: two stories, with a fine stonework façade, a large covered porch, and an attached garage that looked as if it had been added in more recent times. I smiled as I saw the horse-trailer parked in front of one of the three garage doors. Wronwright and I went to the front door (me with a large canvas sack in my arms) and were admitted before we even had a chance to ring the doorbell. Freddie practically yanked us inside.

“Thank goodness you’ve arrived, gentlemen! One of the people from the embassy came by again, asking about the camel, and Camilla started to bleat just as he left. He might have heard her, I don’t know.”

“Take it easy, Mr. Stuyvesant. Everything’s going to be fine. Well, let’s go introduce ourselves to Camilla.”

Freddie began escorting us through the house toward the kitchen, where there was a door leading into the garage. We walked in.

And there she was, standing next to Minnie, who was feeding her some oats out of a sack. I have to say, I always considered camels to be fairly ugly brutes – all hump and neck and spindly legs and stupid faces – but this one was different. In the first place, her coat didn’t look like the living-room carpet in a biker’s mobile home; it was a kind of ivory color, still soft and smooth. Also, she seemed to be lacking that supercilious smirk that grown camels always seem to have. Camilla was all wide-eyed innocence, with a touch of shyness. Plus, she was comparatively pint-sized.

“Come on in, gentlemen,” Minnie said. “She’s quite gentle.”

Wronwright and I edged toward Camilla - side-by-side and slowly, like Siamese twins making their way through a minefield.

“Go ahead, Detective Paco,” Minnie prodded. “Make friends with her.”

I stepped in front of Wronwright and reached out a hand to pat her head. Having decided that I meant her no harm, and apparently still being hungry, she licked her lips and grabbed the Panama hat off my head. I snatched it back – what was left of it.

“What the…that was brand new!” I squashed the remaining two-thirds of the hat back on my coconut, and scowled. Wronwright, not unnaturally, considered the episode to be possibly the funniest thing he ever saw.

Now, when Wron gets truly tickled, his laugh takes the form of a series of raucous “haws”, interspersed with loud, throaty sobs. So, he stood there, almost doubled over. “Haw, haw, haw, HUNH, haw, haw, haw, HUNH!” This noise had an unexpected effect on the camel. She gazed at Wronwright, twisting her head this way and that, and then charged at him.

This alteration in events froze the laughter on his lips, as the prospect of being run down by a camel apparently reconfigured his larynx into the approximate size and shape of a kazoo, and the “haws” died away into a high-pitched “Eeeeeeee!”

Camilla, however, far from being vexed by Wronwright, abruptly halted her charge, extended her neck, and began nuzzling my partner’s face.

Freddie clapped his hands in glee. “That was splendid, Mr. Wronwright! Those low grunts you were making are precisely the sounds that a mother camel makes when she’s summoning her calf for feeding time!”

I strolled over to admire the touching domestic situation at close quarters. “Well, well, well! You know, there’s nothing more beautiful than mother-love, Wron. If I were you, though, I wouldn’t do any more female camel impersonations; Camilla might start looking for your udder.” Wronwright quickly cupped his hands over his groin.

Minnie corrected me. “Oh, she’s already weaned, Detective Paco.” Wronwright stood at ease.

“Well, it’s time to execute our plan, folks. Wron, let’s you and I climb into this costume, and remember: we need to move into the trailer quickly. Dusk is starting to fall, but the Libyans will still be able to see over here pretty clearly. We’ve got to convince them that Camilla is actually being loaded into the trailer, and if we give them too much time to study our impersonation, they’re likely to figure out that they’re looking at a ringer.”

We climbed into our respective halves of the costume, and the Stuyvesant sons fastened the Velcro straps and buttons in the middle; Wronwright and I were now as one camel. Minnie pushed the button on the automatic garage-door-opener, and Freddie swung wide the door of the trailer, and slid a ramp out of a slot above the bumper.

I had granted Wronwright the honor of taking the point, and he shuffled forward, Minnie pulling on a makeshift halter (verisimilitude is important in situations like this). I stumbled along behind, and we made our way cautiously up the ramp; however, somehow, our respective gears got unsynchronized, and Wronwright wound up lurching forward at the last second, snapping the fasteners loose. The sudden slack caused me to tumble backward down the ramp; the camel’s rump had suddenly become a free agent. I jumped up and hurriedly scooted up the ramp into the trailer. “Hit it!” I shouted, and the Stuyvesants, who had piled into the front seat of the truck, burned rubber.

“Damn it, Wronwright, I said it was like dancing! One, two, one, two…”

“Listen the only dance I know is the waltz, and that goes one, two, three, one, two, three.”

“Skip it. Let’s get out of this costume.”

The Stuyvesants turned a curve and screeched to a halt where the side road joined the street that ran by their house. My partner and I jumped out and ran to the other trailer parked under the low branches of a tree. Freddie put the metal to the floor and disappeared into the gathering dusk. A few minutes later, a black sedan came barreling down the street in hot pursuit of the Stuyvesants.

“Ok,” I said. “So far, so good. We’ll wait a couple of minutes, go back to the house, load the real camel, and be on our way.”

(To be continued)